nrg Maariv

» see nrg.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Maariv was on the web before Ynet was. Maariv Internet was set up in May 1999, three quarters owned by Maariv Holdings and a quarter by Eyal Rinot, and the site went live that October as Maariv Online at maariv.co.il. Yedioth Ahronoth did not launch Ynet until 2000, a year behind, and Ynet is still the most-read news site in Israel today. Everything that follows here happened in that gap.

The 1999 site was the full package of its moment: the paper's journalism with chat rooms and forums bolted on, an archive, a search box, classified boards for apartments and for cars. In November 2001 it was rebuilt around content written for the web rather than whatever had been printed that morning.

Then came the real attempt. On 6 June 2004, after an investment of 25 million shekels, the site relaunched as nrg Maariv on nrg.co.il with about a hundred people behind it, fifty of them journalists, and Ron Leshem moving over from deputy editor of the paper to run it. The stated goal was to match Ynet's popularity. The new sections were the innovative part for about a year, which is how long it took competitors to copy them and keep their audience anyway.

~ the record ~

~ shox ~

In August 2005 nrg launched a social network for 14 to 18 year olds called SHOX, and for a few years it was a real thing: around 400,000 registered accounts at peak, with more than 250,000 of them showing up daily. In a country of seven million people that is a serious slice of the teenage population.

It closed in 2010, unable to compete with Facebook. Israel's local social web died in the same window most national webs did, and SHOX went with the rest of them.

~ the owners ~

The collapse behind the site is the actual story. Maariv Holdings had lost close to 300 million shekels since the free daily Israel Hayom arrived in 2007. In May 2010 the tech entrepreneur Zaki Rakib put 15 million dollars in for control. By June 2011 Discount Investments, part of Nochi Dankner's IDB group, had taken the company over; it closed 2011 with a 96 million shekel loss and a going-concern warning by mid-2012.

In September 2012 the paper was sold to Shlomo Ben-Zvi, publisher of Makor Rishon, for 70 million shekels. That lasted eighteen months. On 30 March 2014 a Jerusalem court approved the breakup: Maariv itself to Eli Azur for 4 million shekels, and Makor Rishon together with the nrg website to Israel Hayom for 3 million. A site that had absorbed 25 million shekels in a single relaunch was worth part of 3 million a decade later. On 1 May 2014 the word Maariv came off the logo and it was just nrg.

Every country ran a version of this fight. In Turkey the newspaper sites and the portals spent the 2000s at it, and the pattern held there too: one address got the daily habit early and the others spent ten years buying redesigns to try to take it back. I read the Turkish version and never the Hebrew one, so what I know about nrg is what the Israeli trade press wrote while it was sinking.

~ how it went off ~

In 2016 Israel Hayom put out a mobile brand called 360 that replaced nrg on phones. In November 2017 TheMarker reported that both would be deleted, and mako ran a piece that month whose headline said the site was closing and nobody cared. The reasons it gave were editor churn and a lack of deep pockets, which is fair: the site burned through eight editors-in-chief after 2004, one of whom lasted seven months and another four.

It went off on 10 January 2018 and the archive was moved to makorrishon.co.il. The domain still exists. It answers with an Akamai access-denied page, which is a strange thing to leave behind for a newsroom that once had fifty journalists in it.

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